beer flavored – Rollingskull

Some where in time…….

11 years….

11 years ago I was a senior in college seriously doubting my degree choice and deciding to stick it out merely because I was so close to being done.

11 years ago I thought I had found the one… I’ve since found “the one” several more times :S

11 years ago I was 2 months from getting a 99 tacoma… and 5 years 2 months from a 05 Tacoma….

11 years ago my closest friends were in the military serving their country or in college or in the case of one not even in high school yet.

11 years ago I had 3 roommates… one dissappeared into the ether, one married his girlfriend and another will get married in the next year.

11 years ago I started this “blog” because I didn’t want to study for a cobol final. Yeah that’s right Cobol.

That’s how Not A University rolls.

Amusing only to me…

But you clicked the RSS link because you saw a new post didn’t you?

So part of the joy of a MAC is you can replace various system icons with icons of your own or others…. Lets just say I found a found a Futurama icon pack and I couldn’t contain myself when I found “Al Gore’s head”

Hypnotoad and Leonard Nimoy are just the gravy/icing on the proverbial cake.

Hello I’m Johnny Cash…

You know maybe just maybe I shouldn’t use the line from whatever song is playing on iTunes when I start writing… you know it may be a good idea… but you have admit I have your attention now don’t I?

So I took a few days last week and just checked out of reality for bit… and by checked out of reality I mean I had a “staycation” and by “staycation” I mean I’m to f*cking cheap to go anywhere with out a damn good reason. And even then there is going to be alot of damn whining.

From here on out we are going to call the “staycation” what it really was… “Tom fucking around” (Tfa).

So on my little Tfa excursion, I had two markedly different experiences for the about the same price…. on one side I went a picked up “Medal of Honor” for the PC… on the other side I got some zombie novels. Guess which one I enjoyed infinitely more?

First “Medal of Honor” not the greatest game ever, but decent for a single player campaign and lets face it these things are built to be multiplayer and almost no attention is played to the single player experience. I have to say after playing this game it was almost enough to turn me off to first person shooters set in anything close to the real world at anytime. It’s hard to describe and honestly I don’t want to write about it anymore.

OK so after the depressing experience that was “Medal of Honor” my brother had texted me and said I need to check out “Day by Day Armageddon” he then tells me that since I liked “World War Z” I will really like this (great now my brother is amazon.com). So I pick it up on the kindle (more about that in a minute) and sometime around noon on Friday I sat down to start the book… my plan was to read for a hour and then text Curtis to see if he wanted to go shoot guns… As Curtis will tell you he got no such text. I honestly didn’t put down the damned kindle until the battery ran out at around 6 that night. I finished it the next day. So on Sunday I’m going through zombie withdrawal and pop on to amazon to see if there is another book coming out soon, and to my pleasant surprise there is another book available on the damned kindle. Amazon one click purchase for digital goods is very dangerous… especially for zombie books. I read the second book in a afternoon it was just as awesome as the first book. Now granted I don’t have high standards for zombie books, but if you thought “World War Z” was good you will probably like “Day by Day Armageddon”

OK so now a word about digital books… I find that I’m having the same issue with digital books that I had with digital music some years ago. My first issue is apparently I’m not to be trusted with books in digital form since when I went to go “loan” the “Day by Day Armageddon” books I found there were not eligible for loaning, then I started looking at all of my kindle books and sure enough none of them are enabled for loaning. What the hell I thought Kindle could loan books now… so a quick search through the Amazon FAQs section reveals that loaning books is restricted by publisher…. well hell I guess I’m not going to be buying the next book on Kindle. Which now leaves me at a interesting crossroads… while I enjoy having books digitally across multiple devices I have to say the no loaning part (for the most part for me) is a major impediment to the platform. I know that nook has some sort of loaning functionality but I need to research that more before I think about going down that path.

Lets be honest if I got a nook color I would so hack it and put android on it….. On which I would read my Kindle books 🙂

Another sacrafice….

In the Spring of 2009 I sacrificed my blackberry pearl to the NASCAR gods… a week later I got the phone back sans sd card and in a decent shape….

In the spring 2011 race I sacrificed a HTC Incredible with the help of the lower deities Coors and Budweiser….

I think I may need to find a new church… or at the very least stop taking my phone to NASCAR….

Brothers going to work it out

So I was watching a movie last night (Magnum Force) and I had all the lights turned off in the house and it’s about 10:30 and I go… “Damn I want a beer” so I get up to get a beer… now I’ve lived in this place or a few years so I almost never turn the lights on when I go to the fridge or get a beer.

Currently I keep my beer in my keg freezer in the back room which has no light… (this part is important)

I’m going after a Coors in a bottle, since it’s late and I don’t want anything heavy… I feel around and find the right kind of bottle, put in a coozy, twist off the top and go back to my movie…

I start drinking and after the third drink I think to my self… did I get a bad Coors? (Yes yes I know there is no such thing as a “good” Coors)

Once again I pause the movie turn on the light to look at the expiration date and to my horror discover I have not a brown bottle of Coors but a clear bottle of Highlife??

Damn… it’s the last of the beer from 4th of July… foiled by Curtis yet again.

And he wasn’t even trying this time (probably)

Keep until the end…

Long time readers of the blog… and I think there is a grand total of 4 of you now. Probably remember the last round of upgrade fever that hit the batcave which resulted in a TiVo, a MacBook Pro, and a sooner then I would have liked upgrade to my current desktop rig. That last bout of upgrade fever was 2007. Honestly it was pretty much kicked off by coming into a couple of bucks because of a house I sold. I think I may have gotten into beer brewing at about that time too, and I have yet to hear anybody complain about that (when enjoyed in moderation).

So flash forward to 2010 it’s 3 years since the last major bout of upgrade fever… and honestly I don’t think it’s returned. Do I look at the new Core i5 MacBook Pro’s and go “damn that is one sexy machine”? Oh hell yes I do. Am I going to stick with Mac as my laptop platform of choice…. at this time I’m going to say that the answer is yes. I don’t feel this over riding urge to go and purchase a new laptop simply because it’s new. Other then a different body style and upgraded guts what does this new mac do that my existing mac doesn’t do?

In a word not a damn thing. Actually I’m starting to think that I may pull windows off my mac with the exception of a vmware environment. Why install windows on a mac? well in a word “games” and I have to think about the last time I played a game on my mac (spring of 2009) after that I’ve booted into windows just to update it and the AV software, I’m normally back to the mac os within a hour or so. At this juncture it seems kind of dumb to keep a windows partition on my mac. Vmware has matured as a product that it’s pretty usable for those one off devices that won’t work with mac (which in my world are far and few between).

What I find interesting is what I choose to do on my mac vs my pc….

Photos… mac
Videos… editing the one time… mac… watching pc
surfing… pc unless I actually unpug the mac and take it to another room… and honestly I would just assume leave the technology in the office when I get home / get done working.
games… pc
blogging… what ever is most convenient… which again depends on what I’m doing quick dumps seem to go better on the pc… longer sessions (pretty much anything with the category of “musing of a back porch”) tends to be written on the mac. Not that the mac is any better it’s just more portable which lets me get creative in other spots.

When I think about how I use mobile technology I know that a iPad while cool would probably not be used as anything more then a media tablet and digital photo frame. And if I had pictures that I wanted to show off in HD on a 10 inch screen I would so buy one. But I don’t and I tend to be more old school in my technology usage (I still prefer a command line for Christ sake) and combination of mac-book air with a mac mini seems like it would do well for me. At the very least the mac-book air wouldn’t burn my legs like my mac book pro.

Why a Mini and a Air? The Air would be for the day to day stuff, surfing and writing… The mini would be for more cpu intensive apps (vmware, iphoto editing, something with more then a 12 inch screen) of course the cost of those two items is just about to the point of a mac book pro and why buy two when you can have one at the same price.

The part in all of this that drives me up the wall the most? Other then a slightly undersized hard drive (which is fixed very easily by a afternoon and $75) I have zero problems with my mac and it does everything I need/want it to do! I don’t know if I’ve finally hit the point of not needing the latest and greatest or if maybe just maybe I have found technology that can fulfill my needs for a extended period of time.

God it’s hell to have my problems. 🙂

It’s not football… but it will do… for now.

Just finished watching probably one of the best playoff basketball games that the Suns have been involved with in a long time.

Honestly I don’t care if the Suns make it to the Finals… I’m just happy they beat the Spurs. Even if Steve Nash had to take another beating to get the team a win.

Of course being a Cardinals fan… you don’t expect much out of your team… being a Suns fan…. all you expect is misery tempered by the occasional bits of joy. This is one of those occasional bits of joy.

In my eyes… in disposed… in my disguise no one knows.

Everyone is very much into saving money these days… something about it being a down economy and wanting to not lose a house… I don’t understand it’s all just the kingdom of stuff and a credit score. But that is just me and as we have clearly established by almost 10 years of drivel (wow has it been almost 10 years?) I’m far far far from the norm and should not be considered a baseline.

With that being said one of the more things I find very interesting in how my friends perceive wealth. I’m talking not just money, but the other things in that make up a person’s little corner of the universe. Over the course of the last decade or so I’ve observed that for the most part that my perception of wealth has changed greatly. Once based entirely on amount of income and slowly but surely migrating to breadth of experince in life and not based at all on income. Don’t get me wrong, income helps but only so far as putting together the next trip to wherever. I don’t know where this shift originated from, I do know that it seems to be one extreme or the other with me (i.e. obsessed with the bank account bottom line or could care less).

So here is my question… is saving already built into the monthly budget or are you planning on having your spawn take care of you?

How can you have more pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

Traditions are good… some traditions die because the are no longer needed or are no longer cared for. Others die simply because something better comes along and becomes the new tradition. And sometimes your fucking neighbors are working with large power tools at 7pm on a Sunday night because they are just that annoying!

I can’t wait for the heat to get here to put people in of doors until the fall.

One tradition that has fallen by the way side or me is the blogging/writing/whatever on Sundays. It’s been supplanted by football in the fall and movies on Sunday afternoon for the rest of the year. So just like last month and blatantly ripping off the death-by-blog crew yet again, I give you the return of Sunday night blogging. Since I seem to be doing ok with small changes over the course of the last year or so it seems like the time is right.

In the last week there has been alot of beer drunk, and alot of cars turning left which is to say I’ve been on vacation and on internet hiatus other then my phone. So that basically means I’ve been using the living bejesus out of my phone for the last couple of days. Now what I find interesting is my cell phone billing period starts on the 7th of every month. And since I took off for Nascar on the 7th I thought it would be neat to share some quick numbers on cell usage by one guy sending text messages and emails to people who really don’t care that much about NASCAR. Which is to say my friends.

So from Wed 4/7/2010 to Sunday 4/11/2010
-Voice Minutes — 12 (includes all kinds of minutes)
-Txt/mms — 309 txt / 68 mms (inbound and out on both counts)
– Data used — 15MB

For me this is what I would call “heavy usage” basically I was burning through a full battery charge every 36hours. The blackberry I currently have (9630) is notorious for having poor battery life. So that is one guy, now multiply that by the 20k to 30k that are out there for the week and it add in that there are 5 towers to cover the whole space of the track and affiliated parking/camping. And this all happens for two weeks out of the year (one in the spring and one in the fall) when there is no racing going on the local area has a population of probably less then 200 people.

Kind of makes you have a little bit more sympathy for the kinds of things that wireless engineers have to deal with.

I’m just really happy that the guy next to us had a 3ton floor jack in his camp when I had to replace the tire on my truck.

Aftermath….

Did you know that the “Native New Yorker” on Dobson and Guadalupe has $2 pints of Fat Tire all day everyday?

NO?

Did you know that the “Native New Yorker” on Dobson and Guadalupe has $3 22oz talls of Fat Tire all day everyday?

No?

I knew they had great deals on tap beer… I didn’t remember them being that good…

I feel like I got hit by the Cardinals… all 53 of them… plus the coaches… except for Rackers he was in a hurry and missed the kick.

I don’t know how much more football my liver can take…